The three ages of Kate Winslet

It’s a by-product of the job that actors appear to live more lives than the rest of us, but the issue seems particularly acute with Kate Winslet. Still only 37, the star of Titanic and Iris, who finally won an Oscar for The Reader after a record number of nominations, is pregnant with her third child, six months into her marriage to third husband Ned Rocknroll.

There’s a rule among performers and writers that things that come in threes are innately more effective, satisfying or simply funny than those that occur singly or in pairs. And it feels for those of us who have watched the full arc of her professional and romantic life that Winslet is now embarked on the latest of a troika of incarnations.

Born in Reading to a theatrically minded but unstarry family, she made her performing debut at 11, dancing in a Sugar Puffs advert, and has been a darling of critics and awards ceremonies since her 1994 big-screen debut in Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures. Over the years her style, silhouette and professional and personal life have taken strange and often surprising turns. Here, we chart the three ages of Kate.

THE PUB YEARS, 1994-2001

It seems reductive to define Winslet — dubbed “the finest English-speaking film actress of her generation” by US critic David Edelstein — by the men she has married. Nonetheless, the enduring impression of her first public persona is of a girl who fell for the cameraman on a low-budget film and married him in a pub with a sausage-and-mash reception.

Winslet had already built on her early impact in Jackson’s film with Sense and Sensibility (1995) and James Cameron’s all-conquering, romantic behemoth, Titanic (1997), and been Oscar-nominated for each, by the time she married Jim Threapleton in 1998, having met him on the set of Hideous Kinky.

But the abiding memory is not of a girl in a corset but of the buy-you-a-pint tomboy who talked with the same engaging frankness about her fierce determination and her fluctuating weight, who would always oblige the paparazzi with a big, goofy grin or a bovver-booted mock-karate kick. “She smokes roll-your-owns like a chimney,” noted the Australian magazine Who in 1998.

When she put on a frock, Winslet in her pub years looked as if she was playing dress-up. See the lace catsuit she wore to the Sense and Sensibility premiere, or compare the photos of Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio for Titanic with those for Revolutionary Road 12 years later. She and Threapleton may have worn matching Alexander McQueen outfits to marry but the real Kate was the red-nosed figure who sniffled through her vows or who posed, fresh-faced with her stubbly husband and newborn daughter Mia in 2000.

After Titanic, Winslet did worthy and mostly forgettable work — Holy Smoke, Enigma, Quills — until her performance as the young Iris Murdoch in Richard Eyre’s Iris earned her a third Oscar nomination in 2001. Her first marriage ended the same year, and with it Winslet’s ingénue/tomboy phase.

THE MANHATTAN YEARS, 2001-2010

Winslet met director Sam Mendes in 2001, married him in May 2003 in Anguilla and gave birth to their son Joe eight months later in New York. And then she became a bombshell. A credible, sophisticated Manhattan bombshell to be sure, but a bombshell nonetheless.

Here was an actress who performed in serious, weighty, non-blockbusters, occupying the same realms of high-end arthouse as her husband: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Little Children and the 2008 double-whammy of Revolutionary Road (directed by Mendes) and The Reader. She finally won the Oscar for the latter on her sixth go, having become the youngest actress to be unsuccessfully nominated five times. She and Mendes became a fearsome cultural power couple, but her simultaneous apotheosis as a Stateside glamazon can’t be put down to the man who’d always rather be watching the cricket than posing at the Kodak Theatre.

Winslet refused to sell her first wedding to OK! or Hello! and criticised GQ for airbrushing her in 2003, but by 2008 she was glossily groomed in cashmere coat and no knickers on the cover of Vanity Fair. In public she was now pared-down, thoroughly prinked and stylist-primed, poured into Ben de Lisi or Valentino or a knockout Hervé Leger bandage dress. As well as emphasising her enviable bosom, the new wardrobe showed off her toned-in-America limbs. She’d learned how to smile with her mouth closed. In 2007, Winslet became the face of Lancôme, from which other endorsements — Longines, the clothing label St John — have followed.

She was hilariously self-regarding in Extras, hilariously honest to Allure magazine about resorting to 1950s levels of grooming for The Reader: “They even made me a merkin because they were so concerned that I might not be able to grow enough. I said, ‘Guys, I am going to have to draw the line at a pubic wig, but you can shoot my own snatch up close and personal…’” That English self-deprecation was the third strut of her Manhattan poise, balancing the earnest work and the serious glamour: another trinity.

THE ROCKNROLL YEARS, 2011-???

What do you do if you have scaled the commercial and critical heights of your chosen profession, you are in your sexual and professional prime, and your second marriage ends? If you are Kate Winslet, you fess up your regrets (to British, not American, Vogue) and you move on to a new incarnation. The actress’s third husband may have adopted the most stupid surname in the world but it is oddly evocative: they’re living the life to which mature, monied rock ’n’ rollers aspire.

Home is a £2 million Sussex mansion, the social circuit a comfortable mix of wealth, privilege and ex-spouses with visitation rights. Ned was previously married to heiress Eliza Pearson and met Winslet on his uncle Richard Branson’s Necker island when Winslet was dating model Louis Dowler. He now works for his uncle’s space tourism business, while Winslet works when she wants. The 2011 mini-series Mildred Pierce was an emotive epic, tailor-made for a single mum, but Roman Polanski’s Carnage was bitter and bleak, and in Soderbergh’s Contagion she was killed off early. She’s not done much else of note since 2008 and the new baby may take precedence over the four films she has in the pipeline.

A third child bespeaks settled, grown-up respectability, even more than Winslet’s 2012 CBE. She has throttled back the glamour — mostly — in favour of the chic mufti of shades, jeans, boots and blazers, although she showed she could still rock wellies, biker shorts and a singlet when she wowed the Port Elliot literary festival in 2011. It’s been fashionable to diss Winslet’s third marriage (that stupid name) but I hope it becomes a still and settled point for her children and their fathers. Even if that’s the case, you wouldn’t bet against another Winslet reinvention. She’s only 37, after all.